Does Jack Ryan Have a 'Lost' Director?

Has a reboot of a reboot finally landed a director? Chris Pine has been slotted to play CIA analyst turned action hero Jack Ryan for many months now, but the project seemed to be languishing. Last month, though, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura indicated the film, entitled Moscow, might start shooting as early as next winter. And now Vulture reports that Jack Bender is close to signing a deal to direct the picture.

Bender served as an executive producer as well as directing 36 episodes of Lost, including the series finale. As a feature film director, his most notable credit is Child's Play 3, the one set at a military academy that was, frankly, pretty rotten. Vulture speculates that Bender has J.J. Abrams on his side, and that Abrams' word carries a lot of weight with Paramount, which is the studio backing the project. Bender's extensive TV experience proves, at least, that he can work on time and on schedule.

The bigger challenge is the idea of rebooting Jack Ryan as a much younger version of Tom Clancy's character than we've seen before -- younger than Alec Baldwin or Ben Affleck, and decades younger than Harrison Ford. And while the movie versions have played fast and loose with Clancy's fictional works, it sounds like the new edition will ditch the canon altogether, working from an original script that had nothing to do with Ryan. Pine displayed good potential in Abrams' Star Trek reboot, but can he -- and a Lost director -- combine to revitalize interest in a character who began life as a Cold War warrior?